The psychedelic sound was spilling out of Britain and the Bay Area, and the Kinks didn’t quite fit in. But at the beginning of “David Watts,“ this album’s excellent opener, we hear the backward masked count-off played in a trippy nod to fashion, followed by some fa fa fa’s that had mutated from la la la’s. There is nothing psychedelic about the rest of the song—it’s an old-fashioned character study—nor about the rest of the album, from the roistering “Harry Rag“ to the gorgeous closer, “Waterloo Sunset.“ Articulated in the first few seconds of the record is Ray Davies’s peculiar response to the 60s’ emphasis on new sounds: Despite a superficial nod to modish weirdness, he was more interested in what he could make of the past. Later albums would sound positively regressive, and more interesting than just about anything else in popular music.